Power Without Politics

Reshaping America isn’t all about elections.

ST. FRANCISVILLE, LA.—Living in a small Southern town, it’s easy to forget that politics exists.

When I was working in Washington, D.C., as a journalist in the 1990s I would return here from time to time to visit my folks. It never failed to irritate me how disconnected everyone here was. Didn’t they know there had been a Republican Revolution and Speaker Gingrich was going to set everything aright? I was on Capitol Hill watching it all go down—and nobody cared to ask me what it was like. What was wrong with them?

Now that I live in my hometown, I see this disconnect not as a vice but as a virtue. A limited virtue, and a risky one: living here, it’s easy to believe politics doesn’t matter much and to give oneself permission to disengage. When the only political talk you hear is the Hannity-Limbaugh line, it’s tempting to turn away and focus on private life.

This suits my temperament. I tend to be a decline-and-fall pessimist. Perversely enough, little makes me happier than devouring a freshly baked Spenglerian meditation on how our civilization is staggering towards decrepitude. But then I think about a dinner I had a decade or so ago in my Brooklyn apartment. As usual, my guests and I were decrying the decline of Christianity. One of us, a Catholic priest, agreed that our gloom and doom was justified but accused us of lacking perspective.

“You only see the rot, and it is very real,” he said. “But you don’t see the possibilities. When I was a teenager in the ’70s, the only option you had for catechism was the liberal priests and nuns in the parish. Nowadays, you can go online, tonight, and have Amazon.com send you in less than a week a theological library that Aquinas could only have dreamed of. Do you realize how fantastic that is?”

He went on, talking about how our contemporary age, for all its chaos and breakdown, also contained the seeds of renewal—if only we had the wit to see what was in front of us.

People who think small towns are a refuge from the crises of our civilization are deluded. You’re probably better off here than living in a city, but you see the same patterns of social change, including the same dysfunction and pathologies. When I was a kid, out-of-wedlock childbirth, unemployability, and intergenerational poverty were almost wholly black problems. Not anymore. The barrier between healthy and diseased doesn’t follow the color line.

To whom can we look for relief? The government? Please. Politics? The Republicans and the Democrats are, to paraphrase the poet, ignorant armies clashing by night.

Besides, the rot is not primarily a political problem. You can’t pass laws to change the character of individuals or communities. Given the realities of our postmodern, post-Christian culture, the best we can hope is to create a legal and political framework in which people are free to make good choices.

But how to choose? This is the heart of our collective dilemma: we have come to value choice over what is chosen.

It’s wrong to yield to fear and paralysis. As Gandalf counseled Frodo, we are not responsible for saving the world, but we are responsible for doing what we can in the time in which we are given. That’s moral realism. And as the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre counseled the readers of After Virtue, the time may come when people of good will lose faith in a debased system and look elsewhere to construct “new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.”

This is what St. Benedict and his followers achieved in the ruins of the Roman Empire, even though—as MacIntyre concedes—they didn’t realize what they were doing. All they wanted to do was pray together and live in peace.

That’s not a political program, or if it is, it’s what Czech dissident Vaclav Havel called “anti-political politics”— the success of which, Havel wrote, cannot be predicted in advance:

That effect, to be sure, is of a wholly different nature from what the West considers political success. It is hidden, indirect, long term and hard to measure; often it exists only in the invisible realm of social consciousness, conscience and subconsciousness … It is, however, becoming evident—and I think that is an experience of an essential and universal importance—that a single, seemingly powerless person who dares to cry out the word of truth and to stand behind it with all his person and all his life, ready to pay a high price, has, surprisingly, greater power, though formally disfranchised, than do thousands of anonymous voters.

Havel wrote that in 1984, as an outcast in communist Czechoslovakia. Five years later, he was president of the liberated country. What might his words mean for us today?

Over the past few months, some friends and I in our small town have been doing something that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. We have been planting an Orthodox Christian mission church in our little Southern town. Our congregation is tiny, and all of us are converts, like the priest who moved here from Washington state to serve us.

At 45, I am the oldest person in the mission. Somehow, each of us—all born and brought up Protestant—found our way to Orthodoxy, the ancient faith of the Christian East. One of us is a sheriff’s deputy who works courthouse security. During slow times, he reads the Early Church Fathers on his Kindle. All of us have stories like that. We are an improbable bunch.

If we had not been raised in a time of turmoil, in which it was possible to conceive of changing churches so radically, and in which, thanks to the Internet, information about Orthodoxy was so easily obtained, there wouldn’t be a mission church on a hill south of town, a congregation in a cypress-wood house under the Louisiana live oaks, chanting the fourth-century liturgy developed under John Chrysostom, patriarch of Constantinople.

And though few people in this conservative churchgoing community know what Orthodox Christianity is, our bearded, ponytailed, black-cassocked priest is not the standout he once would have been in this community, in part because the hippies—yes, the hippies—got here first in the ’70s.

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18 Responses to Power Without Politics

Any program, shucks, any isolated act, which does not have DC as its focus has a much better chance of success than the broad-based, slash-and-burn policies emanating from Washington (all parties and Parties included). America’s problems are not and never were, merely political. America’s problems are not merely ideological. They are of the heart and of the soul.
Carry on.

When I was a kid, out-of-wedlock childbirth, unemployability, and intergenerational poverty were almost wholly black problems. Not anymore. The barrier between healthy and diseased doesn’t follow the color line.

The process of what you describe (transitioning your life from NYC to a small Louisiana town and your faith adherence from Protestantism and Catholicism to the Orthodox Church) could, I suggest, happen only because you are free from the social controls of earlier ages when one’s “self” was defined by the embedded culture (“socious”) around it. The very act of freedom you and your colleagues enacted is grounded upon what Richard Rorty called a state of “irony and contingency,” which posits that we “know” in our (post)modern age that any creed to which we temporarily assent can be undercut, transformed and/or replaced via interpretative “irony”, if our life-situation (“contingency”) demands it. Holding to a “simple faith” (that is fully believing in a creed knowing of no possible other faith-structuring option from which to choose) is nearly impossible for any thinking person in modernity to sustain when its grounds are scrutinized by self-reflection and/or ever-imposing life events. Even if we consciously seek a “simple faith” by bracketing off these two constructs (by seeking “fundamentals” of a “true” creed to guide us) complexity and its problems inevitably follow. Paradoxically, however, I hazard to guess that most American converts to Orthodoxy are attracted to it precisely because so much of it is exotic and “unknowable” (given its foreign national cultural anchors), unlike the all-to-knowable pseudo-empirical banality of what falsely passes for American Protestantism and Catholicism today.

“Given the realities of our postmodern, post-Christian culture, the best we can hope is to create a legal and political framework in which people are free to make good choices.”

Are you seriously suggesting that people aren’t free to make good choices? That sure is what the foregoing sounds like. Right now you’re free to make any choice you want, good or bad, according to your beliefs. When has that not ever been the case, for white anglo saxon protestants? I know that the ability to make such choices has been limited to others in other times and places (say like not being able to go to school because society denied you that ability in general, or the ability to live in a nicer neighbourhood), but you’re not black and not speaking of the black experience. My B.S. meter is rising…

As for your enjoyment of the feeling that all is lost and that all is about to fall apart, yeah, I feel the same way about existential threats. That said, neither of our respective bugaboos has come pass though both have historically. Your bugaboo certainly is interesting. My has less popular appeal, but will, ultimately, have greater impact.

““Given the realities of our postmodern, post-Christian culture, the best we can hope is to create a legal and political framework in which people are free to make good choices.”

Are you suggesting that in earlier eras, we could hope for something “better” than this? What? Laws enforcing good chouices? Such as? Prior to the post-Christian era, could good choices be compelled? How so? Was that preferable?

For all those who think that changing churches will solve their dilemma. The grass is always greener on the other side – except when it isn’t. If you want sainthood, better to be a martyr where you were planted than seek virtue in the desert, where nothing grows. Liturgical churches have many advantages, but liturgy cannot solve the problem of sin’s presence in the church. Pain is a necessary element of your quest for holiness and happiness.

I was brought up Presbyterian and Baptist (My dad was born, raised Presbyter and my mother was born, raised, educated Southern Baptist). But over the last few years I have found myself disenchanted with both of these denominations and have taken to reading the Bible for myself, supplementing this with C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton and, more recently, Hans Urs von Balthasar. Every day I find myself trending Catholic (!) of all things. And while I am too Protestant minded to start saying “Hail Mary”s, the Catholics (and the Orthodox even more so) allow for the Mystery of Faith that I failed to find in Protestant churches. My personal motto has become “I think that I may believe; I believe that I may understand.” Reason and Faith forever.

It’s a thoughtful and valuable article. Unless American Christians, however, like their forebears, are willing to endure real persecution–and I mean that in even its most extreme forms–nothing is going to be built on the ashes. There is little evidence of that fortitude, yet, but we have a faith that grows on what our enemies seldom expect.

“Are you suggesting that in earlier eras, we could hope for something “better” than this? What? Laws enforcing good chouices? Such as? Prior to the post-Christian era, could good choices be compelled? How so? Was that preferable?”

In prior times you could be lucky enough to belong to a society where people were educated in what the good choices were, and supported by a community that reinforced them and discouraged bad choices. Now you are not allowed to criticize those who make bad choices because it is their choice and who are you to say blah blah blah.

Many interesting insights, but you overlook perhaps the most important by short-changing the Catholic Church, for even today she claims among her vast array of liturgical worship and religious observance every bit of the ancient faith of the Christian East as does Orthodoxy. Perhaps your decline-and-fall pessimism got the best of you again.

Eastern? Greek? Russian? What is the controlling body, who is its patriarch, and where are they located?

I am concerned, in any case, that the Left and gays will in the end simply target this and other churches by using the courts and liberal judges. In Sweden and Canada, clergy have been prosecuted, for example, simply for expressing their religions’ views on homosexuality. This is coming to America. I don’t know how many are aware of this. Certainly the Republican party is clueless.

I suggest reading the following terrific book (“Reedeeming the Rainbow”) by the Rev. Scott Lively of Springfield, MA, who is currently in Federal Court under the Alien Torts Act for preaching against homosexuality in Uganda. He is being sued by gays.

You forget to mention what he is on trial for. He isn’t on trial for disapproving of homosexuality or opposing gay marriage. He is on trial for supporting measures that would literally kill or imprison gay people in Uganda. What if an American Muslim went to Egypt and started to advocate for laws that would kill or imprison Christians. Would you defend his right to “free speech”? As far as the book goes:When Rev. Lively publishes his theories on homosexuality in a peer reviewed scientific journal, maybe I will take his nonsense seriously.